Anno cum tettigonia

String Quartet No. 2

Published scores:
Leningrad: Sovetskij kompozitor, 1985
Cracow: PWM, 1994

Released recordings:
CD Academy/Edel ACA 8503-2, 1991
CD Lithuanian Music Performers Information Centre LMAIC CD 001006, 2001
CD Bronius Kutavičius. The Small Spectacle. – Lithuanian Music Information and Publishing Centre, LMIPC CD 064, 2011
CD Lithuanian Music in Context II. Landscapes of Minimalism. - Vilnius, Lithuanian Music Information and Publishing Centre LMIPCCD067-068, 2011
CD Tiltai / Мости. – Iš arti-005, 2012
CD Chordos. Music for String Quartet. – Lithuanian Music Information and Publishing Centre LMIPCCD082-083, 2014

Bronius Kutavičius has been a long-time adherent of minimalism and achieved remarkable results thereof. In his works, he managed to ‘compress’ musical ideas into concise formulas and reach cathartic fulfilment through continuous repetition, augmentation and thickening of sound layers. With the use of very minimal means, he succeeded to contrive both static and dynamic soundscapes, to propel a perpetual wheel with apparent ease. The ostinato principle is a firm foundation, upon which many of Kutavičius’ works are built.

Anno cum tettigonia (A Year with the Grasshopper) was written for the festival of Elżbieta and Krzysztof Penderecki in Lusławice, Poland. In this particular piece Kutavičius demonstrated his impressive mastery of formal design, cohering to the programmatic idea of the composition: Anno cum tettigonia comprises 365 bars (days in a year), 12 rings of the bell (months), and a new rhythmic pattern is added at every 7th bar (weeks). In addition, at every 19th bar, a new note is added to the scale in one or another part (the square of 19 is 361, which is close to the number of days in a year). The ‘clock of life,’ assembled from so many small gears and gathering speed and mass so quickly, gets inevitably stopped in the end of the composition.

Kutavičius’s minimalism seems to be of archetypical nature, and his repetitive technique bears a likeness of archaic heritage honed through the centuries.

Rūta Gaidamavičiūtė